Letter to the editor: Use public art project at Congress Square Park to celebrate diversity

Let's shift away from the safety of abstraction and commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. or the role of immigrants in the city.

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The prominent Portland hotel once known as the Eastland, seen in 1927, has always employed immigrants to do laundry and clean rooms, notes a reader who suggests that public art in the park next to the hotel could reflect "those workers and their history." Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

The space – next to a prominent hotel, which, since it was built, has employed immigrants to do the work for the people who stay there – could also have an image/art that reflected those workers and their history. First, the Irish women in the 1920s, who, yes, came here via family-based chain migration, cleaned the rooms and did the laundry; now the new immigrants, many women and some men from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Portland’s public art in recent years has tended toward the safety of abstraction and avoided historical commemoration. This is a good moment for change. There is more to Portland’s history than Longfellow and lobsters.